Tokyo, Sep 3 (DPA) The politician slated to be Japan’s next prime minister vowed Thursday in a telephone call with US President Barack Obama to maintain his country’s close ties with its US ally and pledged cooperation with Washington to improve the economy.
The state of US-Japanese ties has been a concern in the US capital with the landslide win of Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. The vote ended more than 50 years of nearly uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The DPJ had opposed a top LDP and US priority, a Japanese refuelling mission in the Indian Ocean that supported anti-terrorism operations near Afghanistan, and it has objected to the terms of US troop deployments in Japan.
Hatoyama said during the election campaign that his party would maintain Japan’s alliance with the US as a priority but cautioned, “We want to move away from US dependency to a more equal alliance.”
In their first conversation, Hatoyama told Obama that he wanted “constructive, future-oriented Japan-US relations”, Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported.
The DPJ president, who was expected to be elected prime minister Sep 16 in a parliamentary vote, said Obama congratulated the party on its elections victory, but he did not release any details of the 12-minute phone call to reporters, saying it was the request of the White House.
The White House itself said Obama pledged to work closely with Hatoyama to strengthen the global economic recovery, combat climate change, curtail North Korea’s nuclear activities and confront Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
“President Obama and Mr Hatoyama stressed the importance of a strong US-Japan alliance and their desire to build an even more effective partnership,” a White House statement said.
The DPJ won 308 of the 480 seats in the House of Representatives Sunday. It had won control of the other chamber of Japan’s Diet, the House of Councillors, in 2007.
